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| Siemens Energy's SGT-A35 gas turbine. Credit: Net Zero Technology Centre |
At the RWG facility in Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, Siemens Energy and Net Zero Technology Center successfully demonstrated the operation of a gas turbine (SGT-A35) using methanol.
The demonstration reduced NOx emissions by 80%. 3D printing was used by Siemens Energy to manufacture new components that would allow the natural gas electric power facility to use methanol (methyl alcohol). Such technology would allow any existing natural gas power plant to be retrofitted to use methanol.
And since natural gas electric power plants have the lowest capital cost of any baseload or peak load facility, new methanol electric power plants could easily and cheaply be deployed practically anywhere.
Methanol is a liquid fuel that is much easier and safer to transport and to store than natural gas. Methyl alcohol can be synthesized from natural gas and from fracking.
But methanol can also be derived from a large variety of-- renewable resources:
1. the fermentation of urban sewage
2. the fermentation of agricultural animal waste
3. the pyrolysis of hydrocarbons from urban garbage
4. the pyrolysis of hydrocarbons from agricultural crop waste
5. the pyrolysis of hydrocarbons from the dead trees and fire hazardous foliage from rural forest
6. the nuclear, solar, wind, or hydroelectric production of hydrogen through the electrolysis of water synthesized with CO2 directly extracted from the atmosphere or cryocaptured by from the flu gases of a methanol electric power plants using carbon neutral methanol
So practically every urban, agricultural, and forested area within a country could be use to produce carbon neutral methanol.
Renewable methanol could allow countries to retrofit existing natural gas power plants to use a carbon neutral source of fuel making it easier for the world to reach a carbon neutral economy by the targeted year of 2050.
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